


and take his blessing with ye home

by indigostohelit



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-12 23:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18456821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: Bucky Barnes is drafted into the Army, and says goodbye to Steve. He doesn't do it in the way that he expects.





	and take his blessing with ye home

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Marvel Trumps Hate, and to yusevna, who gave me a ton of wonderful plot bunnies and who is receiving a straight shot of angst.

The rain is hardly rain. The drops are skinny, near-invisible, sketching idly out of the sagging sky; some skid down overhangs and motorcar windows, collect grudgingly on drainpipes, slop at uncertain intervals to the pavement. The rest hang in the air like a crowd watching a fire, meander from corner to corner in no particular hurry, sticking only and reluctantly to passing surfaces: to skin, to cloth, to fur, to the wilting and mildew-smelling collar of Bucky Barnes, his hands stuffed in his coat pockets, pushing through the crowd on Liberty Street with his head ducked and his hair falling damp into his eyes.

The letter’s still crumpled against the skin of his knuckles. He’d tried to smooth it out, after, against the wall of the post office, with his heart pounding and his throat full of bile and the breath sticking in his lungs; thinking, wildly, of some flat-faced man in uniform examining it for damages, for destruction—of someone with a cosh or a uniform or a gun knowing he’d tried to say _no_ , knowing he’d thought _I don’t want_ , and, and, and accusing him of harming government property, and—

—and what? What would they do to him, exactly? Take him away from Brooklyn? Take him away from America? Have him killed?

He imagines pulling it out of his pocket, opening it up here on the street. Seeing the rain wash away the ink, each word one by one, from _The President of the United States to James Buchanan Barnes_ to _make written request for transfer of your delivery for induction_ , until all that’s left underneath is flimsy white paper, clean and smooth as a baby’s blanket, as if nothing was ever written at all.

As if he doesn’t already have it memorized. As if this rain could wash away anything at all; as if it could manage more than sticking his sleeves to his skin, his collar to his neck, his steps to the pavement in front of him as he hurries across Clinton and up past the new synagogue, moving blindly, hurrying on instinct, nowhere to run to.

What is he going to tell his boss? What is he going to tell his landlord? What is he going to tell his mother?

And before he can even think the last, awful thought, swelling against his ribs like a blister inside him, full of terror and regret and sick hot stinging shame where his heart should be—

—he sees the figure on the bench ahead of him, thick old leather shoes in the grass and collar tucked up against the rain. Fair-haired, fair-faced; thin as a breath, and looking like he’ll be knocked over in the next wind.

Inside his coat, Bucky’s fingers curl involuntarily. The order to report for induction crumples.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, as soon as he gets close enough. “What are you doing, fuckin’ nimrod, you want to catch pneumonia again? You locked yourself out or something?”

Steve doesn’t say anything. He isn’t quite looking at Bucky, but off into the middle distance, worrying at his bottom lip with his teeth.

“Hey,” says Bucky, sits down next to him. The bench is damp, even through the fabric of his long coat. “You need my key? I can give it to you, you just gotta come by to give back before my shift’s over.” A beat. “What, you're deaf now? Distracted? You see some newsreel, you've gotta save the world again?”

Steve says nothing, just stares straight ahead. His mouth is set tight. Bucky frowns. “Steve,” he says, and then, louder, “Steve,” and finally he snaps his fingers in front of Steve's face.

Steve doesn't blink.

Bucky's heart, already hammering, skips a beat. “You're sick,” he says. “We've gotta get you out of this rain—get you a doctor. I have—I'm sure I have something socked away, come on,” and he's thinking of the heating, the electricity, the new coat he'd planned to buy—something fine, for once—not that it matters now—not that it would matter anyway—and he puts his hand on Steve's shoulder to lift him up and off the bench, and his hand goes through Steve's arm and lands on the bench below.

He freezes.

There's the bench under his fingers, cold wet metal. There's Steve, next to him, his jaw set and his cheeks pink with cold. And there's his own arm, vanishing into Steve's coat at the elbow.

Steve's face turns to his. His eyes narrow, a little, then widen. Then he says, “Bucky?”

“Mary mother of God,” says Bucky, and slides all the way to the other end of the bench as fast as he can, cradling his arm to his chest like it's been burned. “Fucking hell. Motherfucking Christ in Heaven.”

Across the street, a man coughs loudly. A young girl is staring at him, her eyes very wide.

“Sorry,” says Bucky, to the world at large. “Sorry, I just—I have to—”

He slides, cautiously, back to the other end of the bench. Steve is looking at him, his brow furrowed. He looks pleased, for some reason. He also looks alarmed.

Bucky is somewhat more than alarmed. He reaches out, carefully, to Steve's arm, and tries to close his hand around it.

Nothing. He's making a fist in the air.

But he can _see_ Steve there, and see his wrist vanishing into Steve's arm, completely invisible in the place where Steve ought to be. It's as if Steve is a reflection in water. As if Steve is an image on a movie screen, brought to life.

“What are you doing?” says Steve. “That tickles. Stop it.”

“What am I _doing?_ ” says Bucky, high-pitched. “What am _I_ doing? What are _you_ doing? Why can't I touch you? Are you invisible? Are you a hallucination? Am I going crazy? Oh, Jesus, I can't go crazy, you're already crazy. Oh, God, I can't be crazy already, I can't go crazy before I even get into to the Army–”

“ _Before_ you get into the Army?” says Steve. Now his eyes are wide. He leans closer to Bucky, lifts a hand to Bucky's hair. Bucky feels his eyes nearly cross, watching Steve's fingers move over his forehead, but he can’t feel anything. Even the rain seems to have dried out of the air.

Steve lowers his hand to his own leg, and then seems all at once to notice his legs, his boots, his coat. He lifts one foot, staring at it, and then looks hard at his hand, the long spidery fingers, the knobbly knuckles, and down at his chest.

“Oh,” he says.

“Oh,” Bucky echoes, faintly hysterical. “ _Oh._ That’s what you have to say to me? Not, _oh, why the hell can’t you touch me?_ Not, _oh, why’d you stick your hand halfway through my kidney before I noticed you were here?_ Just _oh?"_

“Oh,” says Steve, but it’s fond, now, a deep protective fondness that Bucky doesn’t know if he’s ever heard from Steve before. There's no uncertainty in it, no confusion. He's thrown, Steve is. But he's not surprised. “Bucky. You can’t guess?”

He’s been trying not to. Bucky’s jaw works. “If I go home,” he says, trying to shove the words out through the sudden, furious thickness in his throat, “if I go home, and it turns out I’m not crazy, and you’re lying there on—on the floor—”

“No!” says Steve, and reaches out to put his hand on Bucky’s arm. They both watch as it falls through. Bucky is paralyzed; Steve looks rueful. “No,” he says, more calmly. “I’m not dead. Well—not yet. Well—not to you.”

“So you are,” says Bucky. The people who’d stared at him for cursing are long gone, but he lowers his voice nevertheless, leaning into the space where Steve’s body heat should be. “A—a ghost.”

“Yes,” says Steve.

Bucky buries his face in his hands and presses his thumbs into his eyes until the stars burst. When he sits up again, Steve is still there. His mouth is curled up, a little.

“Jesus, Bucky,” he says. “You don’t know how good it is to see you.”

“Yeah,” says Bucky, “I really, really wish I could say the same thing. What the hell do you mean, you’re not dead _to me?_ ”

“They asked if I wanted to—talk to someone,” says Steve. “One more time. I thought it meant I’d be talking to you as you are, not—I mean, I thought I’d be talking to you as you will be. I mean-“ He runs a distracted hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up at all angles. Bucky reaches up automatically to smooth it down, before he remembers. They stare at each other, Bucky’s hand still lifted in the air.

He puts it back down, very slowly. “You’re saying you’re not dead yet.”

Steve looks immediately relieved. “Yes.”

“But that you’re gonna be dead,” says Bucky, “later.”

“Yes,” says Steve.

“And that your ghost is here,” says Bucky, “from the future.”

Steve looks like he might nearly laugh. “Yes.”

“Okay,” says Bucky. “When? How?”

A dozen emotions cross Steve’s face. “Well,” he says, “half of it you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. The other half—I don’t know if there’s much point.”

“Much point,” says Bucky. “Much _point._ ”

Steve is looking at him blankly.

“Steve, you fuckin’ idiot,” says Bucky patiently. “I’m going to stop it.”

“Oh,” says Steve, and his body kind of folds over itself, like someone’s hit him very hard in the stomach. “Oh. Oh, Bucky.”

“Don’t you _oh, Bucky_ me,” says Bucky. “So you did something stupid. You do stupid shit all the time, I know that. I know _you_. You got sick again? I’ll save up, I’ll borrow from whoever I gotta, I’ll put you in a Manhattan hospital with the richest folks in the country. You got in a fight you couldn’t handle? Tell me when, tell me who. I’ll bring all my biggest guys, I’ll get him a week before he gets near you. You think there’s some thing, any thing, I wouldn’t do for you? You think I’m gonna watch you fall apart in front of me? You’re right, Stevie. I wouldn’t believe that if you told me.”

Steve is making these noises, low in his chest. “They said,” he says, “they told me. They said I might not want to talk to anybody. They said it might be harder this way.”

“Who the hell are _they?_ ” Bucky snaps. “What do they know?”

Steve sits up, and runs another hand through his hair. He looks very tired, suddenly, and very old, and Bucky is abruptly and terribly aware of the years this Steve has lived that he hasn’t—the things this Steve knows that he doesn’t—not just his own death, but his own life, too, years of it, years of aging and growing and living through things Bucky can’t imagine—

It strikes him. He feels himself go still.

“Steve,” he says, “in the future, am I dead?”

“You don’t remember anything,” Steve says, heavily.

Bucky shakes his head. “What?”

“You don’t remember,” says Steve. “Won’t remember. Anything I tell you. They say—they said it’s for me, not for you. When I go away, everything I’ve said, I’m the only one who’ll remember it. They say—there’s things only the dead are meant to know. They say—it wouldn’t be fair, otherwise.”

Inside his jacket pocket, Bucky’s hand curls slowly around the draft letter.

“It wouldn’t be fair,” he says, slowly. “It wouldn’t be _fair_. And it’ll be fair, that I can’t figure out how to save you. It’ll be _fair_ , that you’re dead, and I can’t do anything. It’ll be okay. It’ll be _right._ ”

Steve looks away.

“What if I told you it was TB,” he says.

Bucky breathes in, breathes out. “Is it TB?” he says.

“What if I told you it was,” says Steve. “What if it was, and I don’t know how I got it, or where I got it. What if I told you it was pneumonia. What if I told you it was an infection. What if I told you it was just being very sick, for a very long time.”

“There’ll be something,” says Bucky. He’s shaking his head, he realizes; he can’t quite make himself stop. “Some hospital. In London, in China—they’ll find a medicine, they could find a vaccine—”

“What if,” says Steve, “I told you it was old age.”

“Is it old age?” says Bucky.

“What if,” says Steve, “I told you I lived to be a hundred and one. What if I told you I had all that. What would you say, then?”

Bucky stops shaking his head. He puts his hands in his lap, and turns them over, and looks down. The calluses there; the square heavy shape of them.

“I would ask for more,” he says. “I would ask for more time.”

Steve’s mouth works briefly.

“You don’t get forever, Buck,” he says, quietly. “Everyone dies.”

“Not you,” says Bucky. “Not you,” and when Steve opens his mouth, he says, “No. No. You let me talk, Steve. You give me this.” He pauses. “You’re really dead?”

Steve just looks at him.

“Okay,” says Bucky, “all right,” and he leans forward.

“I have loved you for so goddamn long,” he says. “So goddamn long that I can’t remember starting to. And I told myself that it was because you deserved to be loved—because loving you made me better—because I couldn’t help it.” He shakes his head again, a jerking motion. “On my worst days, I thought,” he says, “maybe I loved you out of habit. Maybe I loved you because I didn’t know who I’d be if I stopped. That maybe that’s all love was, some kind of fear that doesn’t know it’s fear, some kind of brain-sickness just trying to keep itself alive as long as it can, and one day I’d wake up and realize I’d thrown twenty years of my life away out of—stubbornness. Out of being like you: too stupid to know when to quit.”

He sits back against the bench.

“I’ve earned something,” he says. “From God, or Death, or from _them_ , whoever _they_ are. You can tell them that, all right? I’ve earned my time. That’s what _fair_ is, Steve. Not telling me everybody dies. Not being a fuckin’ martyr. _Fair_ is when love gets what it’s paid for. _Fair_ is when love survives.”

Steve is looking at him. His eyes are very soft.

“A kiss,” he says.

“A kiss?” Bucky echoes blankly.

“One kiss,” says Steve. “If you’ll let me.”

“Of course I’ll let you,” Bucky says, reflexive, and then shakes his head. “You’ll go right through me. And me—I’ll forget about it. That’s supposed to be enough? That’s supposed to make it right?”

“I don’t know if it’ll make it right,” Steve says. He hunches his shoulders, looks up at the slate-grey sky. “But I think I’ll be able to feel it. If I try as hard as I can.”

His face; his long lashes, his narrow bones, the line of his lips. Bucky’s seen it every day for twenty years; to him it’s like the grass, the trees, so familiar now he hardly notices anything but the brightness behind the eyes. But there’s an unsettledness in it, today, a disjointedness to its structure, as if it’s not quite Steve’s. As if Steve is meant, now, to be someone else. Something else.

“God,” says Bucky, and doesn’t know whether it’s an exclamation or a prayer. “God. Yes. Do it.” He hesitates. “Please.”

And he closes his eyes.

Girls are easy, no matter what Steve – his Steve, the Steve he saw this morning – says. Girls are easy, and boys easier; they’re all people, when all’s said and done, people who are tired and cold and hungry for other people, for people who want to speak to them, for people who want to be with them, and if you ask them to dance they’ll dance, and if they don’t know the steps they’ll pretend. Dancing’s not magic, or no more magic than all the other excuses to hold someone Bucky’s known over the years. It’s an reason to touch with a song inside it. He’s never had any more trouble knowing what to do with a partner than telling his body _I want_ , and feeling it listen.

And he’d thought—

—he’d thought that he’d be with Steve, one day, that he’d be in Steve’s bedroom or his own, or an alley behind a cinema or a bar, or the street before God and everybody; and he’d turn to Steve, and Steve would know. How could he not? How could kissing him not be as natural as loving him was, every day of Bucky’s life?

And he’d thought, it’ll be easy; and he’d thought, so love will come to me, then, when it’s time for it to come. Like a river to the sea. Only a matter of time.

His mouth prickles, faintly. He can feel—something, an almost-something; a pressure, an awareness. Not heat, but the idea of heat. Not a body, but the memory of a body. As real as a phantom limb.

He opens his eyes.

Steve’s hand is pressed to his own mouth, and his eyes are closed. As Bucky watches, he curls it into a fist, slow and careful, capturing something there.

“Thank you,” he says, and sighs. “Thank you for that.”

Bucky looks at him for a while. Then he says, “Tell me something.” Steve opens his mouth; Bucky holds up a hand. “I know. I know I won’t remember it. I don’t care. Steve, in the future, before you die—had we done that, before? Will I do that, again?”

Steve smiles. His hand, the hand with the kiss in it, is tucked into his pocket.

He says, “Go and see.”

“Oh,” says Bucky, “for God’s sake, Rogers, you live to be a hundred and one and you're still this fuckin' exasperating?”

“Life is short,” says Steve.

“Yeah,” says Bucky. “I’m gathering that.”

“Life is short,” says Steve, “and it only ends one way. Everyone knows it, and no one talks about it, because how would you live at all?” He leans forward. “But here’s the secret, Bucky: life is shorter than we think. Life doesn’t last a year. Life doesn’t last a day. The people we are, the people we think we are, they breathe just once and then they’re gone, gone forever, changing and vanishing, whirled into the dark. And no one grieves them but the people we’re going to be. No one remembers them except us, weeks or months or seconds later, saying _I used to do—I used to think—I used to love—_ , remembering when we ate at that diner, or put on those shoes, or lay on that grass, or kissed that boy, and never knew it would be the last time. Life is short, and dead men go unmourned. They do it every day.”

Bucky stares at him. And at first he thinks he’s imagining it, and then he isn’t: Steve is growing fainter. He can see the outline of the building across the street through his coat.

He’s thought a hundred times that Steve is so insubstantial that he might just—fade away. He never thought.

“You’ll see me again,” says Steve’s voice. It sounds as if it’s coming from a distance. “The real me, the living one. You’re not a dead man, Bucky Barnes. You'll have years. Years, and years.”

“There must be something I can do,” says Bucky. “There must be something I can—say—”

There’s only light, now, sketches in the air, that might be sun in the mist; light, and distant laughter. “I’ll see you in the future,” says Steve’s voice.

And then there’s nothing at all.

Bucky reaches his hand out anyway. It closes on air. A moment later, a raindrop spatters onto his knuckles.

He stands up. Another drop, cold, slithers down the back of his neck. Whatever interval from the storm he’s been granted—whatever brief truce—it’s over now. Around him, the sounds of shouting, car motors, dogs barking. A cabby leaning on his horn. A woman calling to her child.

Bucky Barnes stands on the corner of Liberty and Clark.

And, for a moment, he sees the future.

The crowd is moving around him. Slowly, at first, and then faster: a great panting monster of noise and brilliant color, rushing forward and forward, blurring until it’s nothing but light. Motion, through his body. And the buildings, rising and falling, bursting into flames and overhangs and vanishing, some of them, and some of them remaining; and the sky whirling into blue and grey and black and silver stars, which fade one by one into the swelling electricity below; and the streets slicing through the edifices, the motion along them and their stillness. And the people talking and laughing and eating and walking and sleeping and waking, their noise and breath which they trail through the air behind them; a hundred thousand billion footprints, overlapping and crossing, as if the city were a snowbank, the city a snowbank and Time a blizzard, fierce and wild and growing stronger every moment. And those behind, lifting their shoes high and setting them down in the deep, deep steps of those who have walked before.

The rain is sleeking down now. Pooling around his shoes.

Bucky shakes himself briefly, like a dog. Then he hunches his shoulders around his ears, and begins to walk up the street. The city moves with him, against him, a slow and endless torrent. He’s growing distant. In a few moments, he’ll be invisible.

He’s thinking about talking to his mother. He’s thinking about what his landlord will say. He’s thinking about laying his socks out on the radiator. He’s thinking about dinner.

He’s nearly gone, now. Vanished into the crowd. One small thing in a great thing of perpetual motion, until he stops moving. The rain will last for hours before it’s done.

**Author's Note:**

> Liberty St is now the west border of Cadman Plaza, which was completed in 1939 but you know how it is. Title from an 1850s Temperance variation on "The Parting Glass".


End file.
